Monday, February 14, 2011

Balanced to within an inch of its life...

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

President Obama has presented a budget that slashes spending all over the place…and still doesn’t balance the federal budget.

The GOP is crying foul and will sure as shit produce their own budget proposal that will eliminate all kinds of important shit, shit that’s more important now that we’re in a state of economic fubarity than ever...but they won't balance that motherfucker either.

Here's the thing - we can cut programs and eliminate spending until we balance the federal budget.

Oh yes we can!

And since government has sworn to avoid tax equality like the plague (Gawd, forbid the rich pay the same percent in taxes as the masses!!), balancing the budget will mean eliminating spending without any increase in revenue.

A bitch has seen this before. Hell, I faced it my first year out of college! I had a job…income was coming on in…and I had expenses, so income was walking right back out the fucking door. I sat down and realized that I had more going out than coming in. The logical conclusion was to cut spending…but the problem was that my spending was on needed things like food, rent and transportation.

I worked the problem. If I skipped lunch and ate watered down soup for dinner, I could break even. Better yet, who needs soup? Fuck it! I could get by on crackers and cheese …not.

Like many young workers I was faced with the reality that I needed to make more money. Slashing unnecessary spending is a good logical thing to do, but at a certain point…when all unnecessary spending has been slashed and all that’s left is necessary shit like food, shit that makes it possible for a body to get up and go to work in the first damn place…at that point motherfuckers need to start bringing more funds in.

That’s a lesson many of us learned when we first entered the work force…

…and that’s the lesson government rejects every single time they sit down at the table to balance the budget.

Back to our unbalanced budget!

Let's toss in the delicate politics of trying to balancing the budget when some of the largest expenditures are to those popular as hell programs like Medicare and Social Security and…well, shit.

What to do...what to do?!?!

Government won’t bring taxes into alignment because a good minion knows better than to bite the hand the feeds it…they don’t want to cut into popular programs…they don’t want to eliminate defense spending…

Good Gawd, our government is a youngin’ straight out of college in denial that it needed to get a second job yesterday!

And fuck it all from heaven to hell and back again, these will be the same assholes whining and keening when we the people fail to get our spend on and put ourselves further into debt when [insert bullshit holiday invented to seduce the masses into spending money we don’t have on shit we don’t need] comes around.

Pause…sip coffee…continue.

Confession - I kind of wish someone would go ahead and produce an example of what a balanced federal budget would look like if they cut spending on everything but defense, Medicare and Social Security.

5 comments:

Funny you should bring up the budget. My friend recently sent me a link to news site about the budget crisis in California. The writers had created this application on their website that allowed visitors to slash the budget until the state broke even. And you know whats funny, it actually hurt sitting there trying to figure out what to cut and what to leave. Even though it was hypothetical, cutting the budget for government aid to the elderly and disabled made me feel like such a horrible person. lol, in the end I just ended up increasing taxes for cigarettes and alcohol and releasing most of the non-violent drug offenders!